Notes from the field.
On AI, marketing, enterprise sales, and the future of how technology gets bought and sold.
337 commits in seven weeks: I built and launched Campsite Ranger solo with Claude Code
Campsite Ranger went live this month: it watches recreation.gov around the clock and emails you a booking link the moment a sold-out Colorado campsite…
Cloudflare’s new crawler defaults don’t touch most brand-owned content
Cloudflare will start blocking AI training and agent crawlers by default on September 15, but only on pages that carry ads. USA Today, Politico, Reute…
The ANA's new retail media rules are hardest on the networks that just launched
The ANA issued its Retail Media Measurement Standardization report on August 18, built with more than 40 brand heads of media and reviewed by seven ne…
The ad business your brand funds now carries about a third of Walmart's operating income
Walmart's Q2 FY27 landed Thursday: revenue up 5.9%, operating income up $2.1 billion, global advertising up 38%. That's two straight quarters of an ad…
ElevenLabs pays voice talent per use. Advertising spent 30 years buying its way out of that.
ElevenLabs has paid voice creators $22 million, double what it reported in November, and it pays per use. Advertising dropped per-use pay decades ago…
Stripe paid $7 billion for a company that switches away from your model
Bloomberg reported Sunday that Stripe agreed to buy OpenRouter for more than $7 billion — a company with fewer than 100 employees that routes traffic…
DoubleVerify sold for half its IPO price and the buyer said “independent” nine times
Nielsen agreed on August 6 to buy DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion, or $13.60 a share. DV went public in 2021 at $27 and opened at $35. Eleven months af…
Two customers Criteo won't name took a third of its retail media profit
Criteo's Q2 landed Wednesday: revenue down 11%, the stock down 28%, the CFO replaced. Retail Media contribution ex-TAC fell 21%, carrying a $21 millio…
Your ChatGPT ad pixel starts reading your forms on August 17
OpenAI announced Friday that Automatic Advanced Matching turns on for every existing ChatGPT Ads pixel on August 17 unless you opt out. It reads what…
People Inc. lost 22% of its sessions and its ad revenue stayed flat
People Inc.'s Q2 call landed Tuesday: core sessions down 22% year over year, Google search traffic down 40%, Google now sending 21% of total traffic.…
The IAB's new AI visibility rules contain exactly one hard number
The IAB published 36 pages Monday on measuring whether your brand shows up in AI answers, sorting every claim into directional data and decision-grade…
Your agency wants to sell you AI tokens the way it sells you media
Digiday reported this week that marketers are being offered free AI tokenization in exchange for signing a principal buying and data services contract…
Google's agent now shops with your customer's saved passwords
On July 30 Google gave Gemini Spark the keys to desktop Chrome: it browses through the user's logged-in accounts, signs in with saved passwords, and s…
Your next ad's landing page is a conversation somebody has to staff
OpenAI is testing a ChatGPT ad where the click opens a conversation with the advertiser's own AI agent instead of loading a website. Amazon already pu…
OpenAI spent $2,000 on compute and got ten math proofs anyone can check
OpenAI says an unreleased model called Astra solved ten open problems in math and theoretical computer science for about $2,000 in compute. The commer…
The most important AI document this week is a deprecation policy
The Model Context Protocol shipped its final spec Tuesday and every writeup is a migration guide. Three things in the release have nothing to do with…
Your AI deal is now a line item in someone's Microsoft renewal
Microsoft passed 30 million paid Copilot seats on Wednesday, adding ten million in a single quarter. Half the coverage calls it vindication and half p…
The company putting digital price tags in every Walmart just bought an ad sales house
VusionGroup, the shelf-label company wiring every Walmart in the US, agreed July 27 to buy In-Store Media, a Barcelona ad sales house with €120 millio…
Google's search ads grew 17% in the quarter AI Mode was supposed to eat them
Alphabet's Q2 print landed July 22 and the coverage is all capex. The number worth staring at: Search and Other grew 17% to $63.3 billion in the same…
OpenAI built an agent product you can't buy without its engineers
OpenAI launched Presence on July 22 — enterprise voice and chat agents with guardrails, evals, approved actions, and a Codex loop that tunes them afte…
A judge just put a price on where training data comes from
A federal judge gave final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement over pirated training books: about $3,000 a book across 482,000 titles, the…
A content farm can make 1,200 fake influencers a day
The New York Times found hundreds of AI-generated doctors and wellness gurus selling supplements on TikTok Shop. One product landed in an FDA Salmonel…
Google moved the recipe links to the top of the AI answer
Google now pins original recipe links to the top of AI Mode answers, in cards with creator names, ratings and ingredient counts, after two years of pu…
Kimi K3 will show up in your renewal before it shows up in production
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16: 2.8 trillion parameters, open weights promised July 27, and a score within three points of Fable 5 on the Art…
Netflix doubled its ad business to $3 billion, and commerce media barely noticed
Netflix's July 16 letter confirmed ad revenue on track to roughly double to $3 billion this year, with upfront commitments closing in weeks. Graded ag…
IBM's lost deals went to the data center budget
IBM warned that Q2 will miss because customers moved capital to servers, storage and memory mid-quarter, and large deals died waiting. The stock lost…
The $53 billion PayPal bid includes an ad network nobody is pricing
Stripe and Advent International bid $60.50 a share, about $53 billion, for PayPal. The coverage is Venmo, checkout and whether PayPal's board will eng…
Gong is a Microsoft SKU now, and ZoomInfo lives inside Claude
In five weeks, ZoomInfo wired its database into Claude and OpenAI's Codex for Work, Clay put its workflows inside ChatGPT, and Gong became a transacta…
Salesforce bought the meter that will price your next renewal
Salesforce closed its acquisition of m3ter on July 1 — a London metering platform that gives Agentforce native usage- and outcome-based billing. The c…
Amazon is now the checkout counter for Papa Johns and Ticketmaster
Alexa+ Agentic Ads, launched June 23 on Echo Show, take a shopper from seeing an ad to a completed purchase inside one conversation — pizza ordered, c…
OpenAI moved into the workflow layer it was supplying
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Work on July 9 — an agent that reads your Slack, Drive, email and CRM and hands back finished spreadsheets, decks, reports and…
Instacart's answer to the search problem is a feed of dinner videos
On June 22 Instacart introduced Immersive Feed — shoppable, TikTok-style vertical video inside its retailer storefronts, in pilot with brands like Hel…
ChatGPT picks its sources somewhere other than Google
New CiteLens research: Google's AI Mode and Perplexity pull roughly 90% of their citations from Google's top-10 results. ChatGPT pulls about 30%. The…
There's a $4 billion retail media network hiding in your food-delivery app
Retail media gets tracked as an Amazon-and-Walmart story, and the two still take about 89% of new spend. Underneath, a third network formed: DoorDash,…
The AI labs are paying private equity a guaranteed 17.5% to sell for them
AWS put $1 billion into forward-deployed engineers on June 30; Microsoft stood up a $2.5 billion, 6,000-person Frontier unit two days later. The part…
I closed my best deal four times
The whole AI-sales boom points at landing the customer — AI SDRs, PLG, ChatGPT ads, pilot-to-production. But once pricing moved to usage and outcomes,…
Six technology shifts later, the same sales job keeps dying
Broadcast, digital, social, programmatic, data, AI — I've carried a quota through all six. Up close they look like six different disruptions. They're…
Meta Built the Perfect Addiction Machine. Nobody Told the Teens.
Brussels just ruled Facebook and Instagram are engineered to be addictive — as the exact users they're built to hook keep walking out the door. A note…
Microsoft spent $2.5 billion to put its own engineers inside your customer's building.
Microsoft launched Frontier Company on July 2 — a $2.5 billion unit staffing 6,000 engineers to embed inside customers and drag their AI from pilot to…
Anthropic cut its agent price. Then the new tokenizer took part of it back.
Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30 at an introductory $2/$10 per million tokens, pitched as near-Opus performance at a third of the cost. Th…
Retail media just passed TV. Sixty percent of it rides on an ad shoppers are starting to skip.
Commerce media just passed TV and US retail media is tracking toward $70 billion in 2026. But more than 60% of that spend rides on sponsored search —…
Anthropic's best model came back. Government pre-clearance came with it.
The US lifted its export controls on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and the model that went dark for nearly three weeks is back online. But in the…
Starbucks is paying baristas to make TikToks. The strategy was sitting in plain sight for a decade.
At Cannes, Starbucks said it's the first brand to pilot a custom Creator Network inside TikTok, paying select baristas through ad revenue sharing to m…
Albertsons made a scripted drama from its shopper data. P&G has been here since the 1930s.
Albertsons Media Collective and P&G premiered "Rico's Tacos," a scripted microdrama built from Albertsons' loyalty-card data, at Cannes this month. A…
Kroger is renting its shoppers to TikTok. Walmart spent a year making sure it never has to.
Kroger Precision Marketing launched self-service advertising with TikTok, letting brands target Kroger's purchase-data audiences inside TikTok's own p…
The pages AI cites and the pages Google ranks are barely the same list anymore.
New 5W research, built on Brandlight data, says the overlap between the top Google results and the sources AI assistants cite has fallen from about 70…
Google is turning search ads into a conversation. The keyword is the casualty.
At Google Marketing Live, Google showed Gemini-powered ad formats that run inside AI Mode and conversational Search, not as a row of links. The keywor…
Fox didn't buy a streaming app. It bought the operating system inside 100 million TVs.
Fox agreed to buy Roku for about $22 billion, and most coverage filed it as a content company grabbing a streaming service. What changed hands is the…
Cursor was the neutral choice. The company that just bought it owns a model.
SpaceX is buying Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, for about $60 billion in stock. A huge share of developers standardized on Cursor for one reaso…
Qualcomm paid $4 billion to attack a software moat. Yours is next.
Qualcomm is paying about $3.92 billion in stock for Modular, a startup that makes no chips — only software that runs an AI model across any vendor's s…
Walmart bought the self-serve button for TV. It's aimed at the advertisers TV always priced out.
Walmart is acquiring Vibe.co, a self-serve connected-TV platform with 10,000+ mostly-SMB advertisers that lets you buy streaming TV like a paid-social…
Walmart let ChatGPT and Gemini sell its products. It refused to let them own the customer.
OpenAI's Instant Checkout converted about three times worse than Walmart.com, so Walmart pulled it and embedded its own Sparky agent inside ChatGPT an…
OpenAI and Anthropic are going public. Your AI contract should price that in.
Anthropic filed a confidential S-1; OpenAI followed, targeting a September debut around $730–850B. When your model vendor becomes a public company, it…
The AI SDR boom is real. Retention is the test it has to pass.
AI SDR tools are a multibillion-dollar category growing fast — and wrestling with retention, with some vendors losing a large share of buyers within a…
The companies with the best AI on earth are hiring salespeople faster than SaaS is.
At OpenAI and Anthropic, go-to-market is the single largest category of open roles, about one in five, ahead of research and engineering. The firms mo…
The government pulled the best AI model on earth four days after launch. What's your fallback?
Anthropic shipped Fable 5 on June 9, its most capable model ever. By June 13 the Commerce Department had ordered it dark for every foreign national on…
OpenAI now takes Oracle credits. Your AI deal is competing with money that's already spent.
OpenAI's models can now be paid for with Oracle Universal Credits, and the announcement ends by sending buyers to their Oracle rep. Cloud commitments…
The Boomers cut the cord too, and most media plans missed it
For three years the cord-cutting story has been about the young walking out on cable. The 50-plus crowd quietly did the same thing while everyone watc…
When private equity buys your software vendor, the roadmap goes with it.
Thoma Bravo closed its ~$2B Verint deal and wrapped PROS, while Vista and Silver Lake circle the same profitable, sticky software now trading cheap af…
Per-seat software is dying. Your renewal is where you'll feel it first.
Roughly $285B in software market value vanished in February once investors did the math on AI agents that don't pay for seats. Gartner expects 40% of…
Your next big customer is a shopping agent that doesn't care about your brand.
By 2030, NielsenIQ expects about half of online shoppers to hand routine buying to an AI agent, and pegs the U.S. agentic-commerce prize near a trilli…
Banks are done piloting AI. What they're buying now is boring on purpose.
Banks moved from AI pilots to production fleets of agents this year, and Wolters Kluwer says 44% of finance teams will use agentic AI in 2026, a 600%+…
Commerce media just passed TV. And the agents are taking the keyboard.
WPP says commerce media hit $178B in global ad revenue and overtook TV for the first time. At the same moment, Amazon and Walmart are moving the actua…
Microsoft just made “shadow AI” the new shadow IT. Your agent has a new gatekeeper.
Microsoft took Agent 365 generally available and pointed it straight at “shadow AI” — unmanaged agents running inside the enterprise. It can already d…
Two AI labs are about to go public. The model was never the moat.
OpenAI is targeting a September IPO, Anthropic is racing to follow in October, and the S-1s will force both into a kind of financial transparency the…
Anthropic just crossed $900B. The AI category sale is over.
Anthropic is reportedly closing a $30B round at a $900B+ valuation. PwC is certifying 30,000 professionals on Claude. The Big Four have placed their b…
Oura just filed to go public. The hardest test comes after the IPO.
Oura confidentially filed its S-1 yesterday — 5.5M rings sold, an $11B valuation, a category it invented. The harder challenge isn't the debut; it's t…
Two weeks later: OpenAI shipped the Ads Manager. The seller's read.
Two weeks ago OpenAI opened self-serve ChatGPT ads. Today the actual Ads Manager UI shipped, with Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis, WPP, Adobe, Criteo, and S…
The fake watches were better — and that should terrify every brand
Justin Taylor's piece on The Landing Pad asks a simple question about the Swatch x Audemars Piguet teaser: when AI fills the white space between tease…
Publicis bought LiveRamp for $2.2B, and with it the identity layer of the open internet
Press release landed Tuesday: Publicis is paying $2.167B for LiveRamp — $38.50 a share, 29.8% premium, all cash. Most coverage treats it as another ho…
Claude autonomously found a 17-year-old zero-day. Pen-testing as a service has 12 months.
Anthropic gave Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike early access to an unreleased model called Mythos. In limited testing it autonomously…
Stanford: agentic AI delivers 71% productivity gains. 80% of enterprises will miss them.
Stanford's 2026 AI Index Report dropped, and most of the coverage missed the actual story: 71% median productivity gain for enterprises using agentic…
The week agentic AI stopped being a demo
On May 5, Anthropic put Claude agents into production at JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citi, AIG, and Visa. Not pilots — production. Salesforce Agent…
OpenAI just turned ChatGPT into an ad platform. Here's what brands need to do in the next 90 days.
On May 5, OpenAI dropped the $50K minimum, opened self-serve to every U.S. advertiser, and added CPC bidding. The ChatGPT pilot is already pulling $10…
GEO is the new SEO — and most brands are already losing
I searched "best CRM for mid-market" in ChatGPT and Claude this morning. The same three vendors came up. None of them were the category leader. Here's…
AI didn't kill the entry-level job. Interest rates and a tax change did.
The narrative is clean: AI is replacing humans, that's why nobody's hiring. The data is messier. A Federal Reserve study of one million firms found "p…
Selling AI to skeptical buyers (a field guide)
Marketers, agency leads, pharma commercial teams — the buyers I sell to are smart, busy, and have seen 50 AI demos this quarter. Here's how I frame th…